Reflections on UK GovCamp 2011 and a discussion around online archives #ukgc11

There were some particularly inspiring and thought-provoking sessions at UK GovCamp 2011 last Saturday. The ones I found most enjoyable were:

The session on trade unions led by Paul Evans, starting off with a rough aim to make trade unions more open and democratic and ending with ideas for a Rate My Union, Rate My Workplace and a mumsnet style online community space for people to talk about their working life which is well moderated and managed to ensure conversations don’t equal dismissals.

The Localism session led by Will Perrin, which he has written about here. During it Nick Booth had some interesting things to say about the type of people who tend to develop effective community sites (sociable, community-focused people who see adding to them as a personal passion rather than an item on their task list) and how social media surgery style training can be a stepping stone for them making use of relevant open data.

The creative collaboration session led by Lloyd Davis (who has created some interesting online mass participation projects such as Most Interesting and Journal Racing) which questioned what makes certain ideas capture people’s enthusiasm and imaginations, people’s motivations to participate and the power of Lloyd’s own social capital as he prepares to become the object of his new project Tuttle to Texas.

I myself didn’t go to Local GovCap with the intention of leading a session but as people started pitching, I realised I could take the opportunity to have a conversation around something that’s been on my mind for a little while.

Me pitching by Paul Clarke

Before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Community Engagement Methodologies workshop that the King’s College London team behind Strandlines had organised.

One of the many thought-provoking projects I was introduced to during the course of the day was the Mass Observation Communities Online project, which builds upon the work of Mass Observation, which has been collecting recordings of everyday life in the UK through diaries, questionnaires and observations since 1937.

The JISC funded Mass Observation Communities Online project (or MOCO for short), which took place in April-September 2010, has ‘expanded on Mass Observation’s tradition by inviting community groups throughout the UK to develop an archive that reflects life in 21st century Britain.’ The material created by groups and individuals from all over the UK was then collated and shared online on the MOCO project website.

This online collection of recordings in the shape of observations, day diaries, photographs and questionnaire responses got me pretty excited from a hyperlocal angle, so the next day I started looking through the site to try and find and share locally relevant content. However, I soon found this wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be.

This is by no means unusual with archive material, most of which isn’t online at all, which is sad – heritage and history on a hyperlocal website brings the content to a local audience that may not go searching through archives and is often a great driver for discussion and sharing of memories in the comments box. So I was eager for a UK GovCamp discussion around how archive materials might be better stored and shared online in ways people can easily find and use them. I started by outlining the main obstacles I’d stumbled over with sourcing archived materials online, namely:

1. The material isn’t shared online

Film Archive for the South West of England

A dictionary definition of an archive is ‘a place or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest.’ It seems the primary purpose of an archive is to collate, catalogue and store those records so they are preserved to prevent future damage.

However, those records are being preserved for a reason – because they are historically or socially significant in some way. This makes them interesting to pretty much anyone looking at their subject matter or topics they touch upon – be they academics, journalists, people writing for a local website or merely someone with a passing interest. If records are being archived with the intention of sharing as well as preserving them, they should be published online where possible as that’s where most people will be searching for them.

Obviously where there’s a big backlog of records there may not be the capacity to get the material online straight away but if this is the case, at least consider publishing the catalogue in an easily searchable format online so people can know what’s in storage. I’ll do a bit of compare and contrast here just to illustrate between South West Film & Television Archive and MACE (Media Archive for Central England). The South West Film & Television Archive’s webpage is very much just a description of the collection they hold, no details of individual films held by the archive are available to search through and no films are available to view on the site. However the MACE website allows you to search through the archive on their website. Only some of these films are available to view on the website but where they’re not full details of the clip’s contents (such as date, genre, summary and production company) are listed.

2. Online archive material is difficult to find and filter

The MOCO project website

Where the material is published online, it can be difficult to source and filter through. For instance as a project created to get a snapshot of life in the UK the MOCO project has inevitably produced a lot of locally relevant information, especially for Brighton. As there were two community groups from here taking part (Brighton Housing Trust and Brighton Nightwriters) it may well contain content of interest to the hyperlocal website Brighton and Hove News. But I’m unsure the content will be easy for the website’s editors to find because:

It’s not published in an RSS feed so won’t appear in subscriptions to specific searches (I rely heavily on Google alerts for a search for ‘Digbeth‘ to flag up local online content).

Original posts don’t seem to Google up terribly well, e.g. no MOCO project pages appear in a search for Brighton history/heritage/archive/photography.

The on-site search facility has no filter options and the search box rarely yields results (however, a Google Site Search Query does work better with the site’s content).

To those creating an online archive I’d suggest publishing the content in an RSS feed and tagging it well, so it appears in people’s searches and alerts. Also consider publishing items on a ‘sharing’ site where people traditionally search for content (e.g. Flickr for photographs and YouTube for film) – they can always be copied over/embedded from these sites onto your own platforms.

Of course the first thing I want to do with this film is share it with a local audience on Digbeth is Good but there doesn’t seem to be a simple way for me to do that – there’s no embed code available to copy. Jon Bounds managed to share it on Birmingham it’s Not Sh*t through ‘hunting through the source on the MACE site’ but admits ‘it’s not easy’ – so not something someone less technical (like me) or someone working with a free wordpress.com website would be able to do.

Bull in the Bull Ring on Birmingham It's Not Sh*t

I’m guessing one of the reasons for this is the sticky issue of copyright, which I’m far from an expert on, but it would be great if these issues could be resolved for some older materials and new archives created were shared under a Creative Commons license.

The UK GovCamp discussion on the topic covered some interesting points such as:

â€œWhat if Flickr dies?â€ Caution needs to be taken with relying upon what might be temporary online platforms to store and share archive materials – if these platforms disappear so will the content! However, I still feel they are useful places to share content even if they cannot be solely relied upon to store it.

Many organisations that store archives struggle for funds and rely upon sales of their material as a source of revenue. Understandable that they need to cover their costs but the idea of historical records being inaccessible to those who can’t afford it does make me uncomfortable.

But as is always the case with these things, it seems there’s no easy answers – we couldn’t come to one during the hour we spent talking about it at UK GovCamp. If anyone as any ideas or food for thought on this subject I’d love to hear it!

Reader Interactions

Comments

Your session was great – I regretted missing the start, an the bull, but at least now I have a link and can see it online.

I made two points during the discussion. Firstly, the distinction between our own pics on Flickr, which most of us will probably have copies of locally, and so not need to retrieve; and the metadata, added by ourselves or others, such as tags, names of people shown, comments, and groups in which they appear. Such things are impossible to back up or extract. Likewise, other people’s pics, on which we have commented or which are in groups to which we have has subscribed. My blog post “Sharing images openly is better than uploading to single sites” also touches on some advantages of holding metadata locally.

My other point was about video archives. A lot of effort â€“ and public money â€“ goes into digitising old home movies, local newsreels, plus other films and videos, but I read and hear very little about people doing so accessibly; chiefly by providing closed captions (what most people think of as subtitles). For example, this story about a Bull on MACE has no captions (your clip is silent, so captions aren’t necessary). While I appreciate the extra cost and effort this might introduce, it is still important. I’d be happy to hear what captioning is being done, or why it isn’t. I’ll also be happy, of course, to share findings with you.

Good points Andy, especially about metadata added by readers. Often when publishing archive material a little crowdsourcing of its back-story comes about very naturally (I love people trying to decipher the date of a film clip in the comments area of this post: http://digbeth.org/2011/01/youtube-37-route-birmingham-to-solihull-part-2/) – but if you can’t export that discussion and iformation added by others from those platforms then that’s a problem.

[…] to be discussed so I took the opportunity to have a conversation around something thatâ€™s becoming a bit of a bugbear of mine: archive material and getting thise who hold it to publish it online in a way thatâ€™s easy for […]